I thought it was a joke when I first saw a blogger link to a story about this, but apparently it's legit: the Catholic Church is outsourcing prayers to India. (Do a Google News search to find many more articles on the topic.) I don't know, I don't know....is this a good sign, that the church is failing in the U.S.? Is it just a typical sign of greed and exploitation? Probably a bit of both. Bizarre, really.posted by Dub at 4:12 AM

Friday, June 25, 2004

This falls under blog it quick and permanently before it goes away: I stumbled upon what may be one of the Funniest. Letters. From. The. Editor. Ever. in the Narragansett (RI) Times. Since I don't think they keep items permanently, and indeed since it has already become difficult to find it on their website, I guess it falls to me to archive it for posterity:

Letter from the editor
By:Marcia Grann O'Brien 06/09/2004
Occasionally, we get duped by a letter-writer, and that happened in the Wednesday, June 2 edition of The Narragansett Times.
A letter purporting to be from a student at the University of Rhode Island contained what appeared to be high praise for an elected public official. The writer said she moved around a lot from dorm to dorm; and while we attempted to contact her at her listed address we were unsuccessful.
Because the letter did not contain criticism - so we thought - and was signed, with an apparently legitimate address, we published it.
South Kingstown High School teacher Jim Buxton called the following day to alert us to the fact that the writer, who signed the letter "Leni Riefenstahl," had assumed the name of an infamous Nazi filmmaker who made propaganda movies in support of Adolf Hitler. She died last year at the age of 101.
That's how we learned the letter that appeared to praise a local public official was in fact decidedly nasty in nature.
We are grateful to Jim Buxton for calling this ruse to our attention, and to Nelson Crook for further enlightening us about the infamous Leni Riefenstahl. Two or three other alert readers contacted us - including one who wanted to be certain we'd understood every nuanced insult . . .and asking whether we were going to discuss them in detail in this edition . . . leading us to wonder . . .
We've no hope, of course, that anyone will 'fess up to the deception, but we suspect we haven't heard the last from him [or her] - in another incarnation, of course.

I just hope someone can find the original letter for me. I'd love to see it. In the past, the ProJo once printed a series of critical letters on opposite sides of an issue "signed" by Hitler and Stalin respectively, but with the real authors' names signed after the fake signatures. They knew what the authors were up to and printed them deliberately. But this slip-up just takes the cake....posted by Dub at 3:56 AM